Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The revolution will be live…

This bitch has been following the post-election protests in Iran. Thank the gods for Twitter, because Lawd knows that traditional media outlets aren’t breaking news on this one.

That’s not surprising.

The selection-based Iranian election and protests that have followed aren’t the kind of quick hit and then move on story that traditional media is currently set up to deliver. That explains why even the Sunday chats were full of talking heads trying to spin whether the election results in Iran…the same results that are being disputed…are good or bad for President Obama.

It would be too much like right for them to explain how politics function in Iran, who has taken to the streets and why, who the key players are, and why we should all give a damn about this…to cover protests instead of assuming nothing will come of them, to document the crack down instead of smugly discussing how predictable it is and to explore the possibilities even though the current regime says that the election is over.

9 comments:

Where are you getting your information? Oh.. that sounds snotty and it wasn't meant to be snotty. My curiousity is sincere though. Who do you follow on twitter that is presenting news on the protests? I have not heard much on them.

Ady - start with searching "cnnfail" through Twitter and you'll find a lot of folks covering this. You can also search "Iran" and "Iranian election"...but the cnnfail results appear to be specific to news that CNN is failing to cover.

Television frames everything within the status quo. In Guatemala recent massive protests were organized via twitter, My Space and Facebook, to the extent that they started arresting tweeterers!

It's so dysfunctional that we won't get the real dirt on what's going down in Iran, if you think how important the developments of hostile countries with nuclear weapons are to us as a nation ... especially as the warmongering nation that we've become ...

I think Obama is right to keep arm's length from what's going on in Iran. Is it legit? May very well be -- but if so, the Iranians will do best to sort it out without Western interference.

I'm not too young to remember that the CIA meddled in a democratically chosen outcome back in the 1950s in Iran, nor that some pretty scary wingnuts have had strong Iran ideas all along. This has included supporting and arming Saddam Hussein to do their dirty work against Iran.

If what's going on there is genuine, then I say stand back and let it happen. But unfortunately, the US has meddled too many times in Iran's history to be trusted to be involved this time around. Iranians must choose for themselves what is best for Iran -- and we must trust them to do so.